On the Election

I heard a friend say, “It’s not like it matters who is president anyway. The world will go on.”

I thought of my friends, my family who would vote for him.

I thought of my friends, my family who wouldn’t vote against him because “She’s just as bad, if not worse.”

It made me think…how many woman have been moved on, grabbed, kissed, fondled without consent?

I was a kid when it happened. About the same age my daughter is now. Playing hide and seek. And I had no clue. I never told anyone. I just stopped hiding with him because I didn’t like how I felt when he stuck his hands down my pants. I didn’t even really get that it was wrong or that there were people you should tell until I was an adult. (Hi, my name is Kate and I still live in a bubble of naiveté). And then you find Kelly Oxford’s timeline and realize there are so many of us. Too many of us.

Now there is tape of a 60 year old man bragging about something no one should ever do and ten years later, he’s on presidential debate stage.

His defense is that it’s “locker room talk”.

This isn’t funny or cute or “boys being boys” or acceptable. This is rape culture. And it’s time we stop allowing it and show our girls and perhaps more importantly our boys that women are people. And we don’t treat people that way. And we don’t talk about treating people that way.

It does matter who gets elected. Hillary Clinton is not just as bad as Donald Trump.

Thank you, Kate. I was going to write my own post, but I feel so despondent about and defeated by all of this. No, she most certainly is not as bad as he is. Never has been. I am so sorry that happened to you. I listened to a woman on the radio this morning say that the events the weekend have done nothing to weaken her support for him, and it made me want to cry, to think of the misogyny she’s internalized to make her OK with this. With him. I couldn’t even watch the whole debate. I couldn’t stand what this has come to.

First off, I am so sorry, Kate, to hear of what happened to you when you were a child. With regards to your upcoming election, I confess I have been keeping my head mostly in the sand. (Because I’m so dismayed/disgusted by it all and as a Canadian am utterly powerless to do anything at all about it. Your friend is wrong — the US president matters ENORMOUSLY, not just to Americans, but to the rest of the world as well.) That being said, I did watch some of the debate this weekend, specifically to hear what he would say about this particular issue, and I was truly disgusted by what I heard. No apology; just “Oh, it was locker-room talk” as if that made it all perfectly ok. The whole “boys will be boys” excuse is pathetic and repugnant, and the fact that a presidential candidate feels he can use that excuse in 2016? That’s just jaw-droppingly, mind-numbingly, head-shakingly unbelievable.

Yes! To everything you just said about our election. And I don’t blame you one bit for keeping your head on the sand, I went back and forth on whether or not to watch the debate. I just keep wanting to wake up and have this be some crazy joke.

Hey there, I’m Kate!

I love yarn, photography, books, and a good cup of coffee. I blog like it's 2007. I write a lot about knitting, Netflix, and any other nonsense that strikes my fancy. Sometimes I get ranty. Welcome to my little corner of the internet!